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AUBREY
WILLIAMS
Edited by Reyahn King

Published by National Museums Liverpool and
October Gallery, London
This catalogue accompanies the exhibitions
Aubrey Williams: Atlantic Fire
Walker Art Gallery 15 January – 11 April 2010
and
Aubrey Williams: Now and Coming Time
October Gallery 4 February – 3 April 2010
Walker Art Gallery
William Brown Street
Liverpool
L3 8EL
www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk
October Gallery
24 Old Gloucester Street
Bloomsbury
London
WC1N 3AL
www.octobergallery.co.uk
CONTENTS
4 PREFACE
Chili Hawes and David Fleming
6 FOREWORD
Reyahn King
10 EXCERPTS FROM ‘CONVERSATION WITH AUBREY WILLIAMS’
Rasheed Araeen
34 AUBREY WILLIAMS: THE MAKING OF A BRITISH ARTIST
Mel Gooding
Edited by Reyahn King
Co-edited by Chili Hawes, Maridowa Williams
and Gerard Houghton
Designed by Jonathan Greet
Printed by Printfine Ltd., Liverpool
Photography by Jonathan Greet, Andy Keate
and Aubrey Williams
Texts © National Museums Liverpool
October Gallery and authors
Images © Estate of Aubrey Williams
All rights reserved, DACS 2009
Front cover:
Hymn to the Sun IV, 1984 (Olmec Maya series)
46
56
60
64
AUBREY WILLIAMS: ATLANTIC FIRE
Leon Wainwright
LIST OF EXHIBITS
EXHIBITIONS AND COLLECTIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Catalogue in publication data available
ISBN 978-1-899542-30-7
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without prior permission from the
publisher.

PREFACE
“I consider myself very fortunate to be alive and working
within the last freedom left to mankind – ART.”
Aubrey Williams came with Atlantic Fire and shed light onto
Now and Coming Time. Highly intelligent and well-read,
Both galleries are extremely indebted to Eve Williams,
Maridowa Williams and to the Aubrey Williams Committee
Aubrey Williams, 1985
open to the new and hoping for like-minded discourse, he
for their generous help and cooperation. We are grateful
came to Europe from Guyana in the early 1950s to find an
for the thoughtful and provocative essays from Mel
art world concerned mainly with itself and convinced that
Gooding and Leon Wainwright in this catalogue, and
no avant-garde existed beyond its cultural borders. Williams
delighted to reprint excerpts from the stimulating interview
helped pave the way for the very recent willingness to
between Rasheed Araeen and Aubrey Williams, first
view art without preconceived bias, without attachment
published in Third Text in 1987. Our thanks are also due to
to any cultural region or nation state. No matter what his
Lynne Truss and Chris Wilson for lending work for the Walker
subject: the demise of native Mesoamerican civilisations
Art Gallery exhibition and to all those at National Museums
through ecological destruction, the visual expression of
Liverpool and October Gallery who have contributed
Shostakovich’s music, the painterly exploration of our
their time and expertise to making the exhibitions and this
cosmos, or the essential character of birds, Williams helped
catalogue possible. Our special thanks are dedicated to
change what he referred to as the ‘real seeing of the
the curators of these twin exhibitions: Reyahn King, Director
world’.
of Art Galleries, National Museums Liverpool and Elisabeth
Lalouschek, Artistic Director, October Gallery.
October Gallery opened in Bloomsbury, in 1979, to exhibit
the Transvangarde, the cross-cultural avant-garde, and
has represented Aubrey Williams since his first solo show
at the Gallery in 1984, Olmec Maya and Now. The Gallery
has provided a platform for the emergence of some of the
most innovative and exciting artists of our time. The Walker
Chili Hawes
Director
October Gallery
David Fleming
Director
National Museums Liverpool
Art Gallery, Liverpool, opened just over 130 years ago,
and holds one of the oustanding collections of fine and
decorative art in Europe. It continues to present the best
AUBREY WILLIAMS: ATLANTIC FIRE
art to the general public through historic, contemporary
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
and thematic exhibitions. These two galleries have joined
15 January - 11 April 2010
forces to produce two linked and overlapping exhibitions
of Williams’ work together with this publication, to establish
AUBREY WILLIAMS: NOW AND COMING TIME
new insights into one of the twentieth century’s great
October Gallery, London
artistic spirits.
4 February - 3 April 2010
(1) Dawn & Evening Star, 1982 (Olmec Maya series)
Oil on canvas, 132 x 208 cm
4 5

FOREWORD
By Reyahn King
Aubrey Williams is an artist whose appeal crosses
boundaries. Born in Guyana, he moved to London to
practise as an artist, exhibiting extensively in England
and Europe from the late 1950s. From 1970 Williams spent
periods working in studios in Jamaica and Florida, returning
to Guyana occasionally to take active part in events such
as the 1972 Carifesta festival. The significance of Williams’
transatlantic life for his art was in the absorption of multiple
traditions, including American Abstract Expressionism
and the historical Central and South American cultures
that were his driving force. The essays in this catalogue
contribute to an ongoing reassessment of Williams as an
important international artist.
Mel Gooding’s essay explains the context of Williams’
arrival and early career in London in the late 1950s and
1960s and critically questions how it was that this major
British post-war artist was overlooked. Gooding describes
Williams’ abstraction and its modernist sources, positioning
him within a British art tradition exemplified by artists like
Patrick Heron and John Hoyland. Both Gooding and Leon
Wainwright demonstrate that it was Williams’ very strengths
of global experience and his deep knowledge expressed
subtly in painting that British peers failed to understand or
feel. Gooding’s essay is an effective riposte to the failures
of the art world to recognise Williams in his lifetime and
Wainwright takes on the later interpretations that have
risked limiting the artist to a role within political cultural
agendas 1 .
Coming from the art world periphery, Williams absorbed
traditions centred in European and American culture
and enriched them. 2 His friends and colleagues in the
Caribbean Artists Movement led the recognition and
development of distinctive literary voices and they, like
him, saw similar potential in other art forms. Decades later,
Andrew Dempsey’s assessment of Williams confirmed
‘that what this artist from the Caribbean had brought to
painting in England had the kind of vitality with which
writing in English had been injected by the poets and the
novelists of the Caribbean such as Derek Walcott and V. S.
Naipaul or … Edward Kamau Brathwaite.’ 3 Williams himself
knew the value of his contribution to European painting
but the undermining assumptions he faced are typified
by a disappointing meeting with Picasso: ‘I remember the
very first comment he made when we met. He said that
I had a very fine African head and he would like me to
pose for him. And I felt terrible. In spite of the fact that I
was introduced to him as an artist, he did not think of me
as another artist.’ 4
Williams resisted classification of himself or his art and
although he was best known as an abstract artist, he
painted representational works throughout his life. In the
Olmec Maya series he combined abstract technique with
icons of South and Central American ancient cultures. This
mixing of abstract and figurative work troubled people
familiar with a particular set of artistic rules that kept them
separate. Wainwright argues that these rules no longer
(2) Maya Confrontation, 1982 (Olmec Maya series)
Oil on canvas,120 x 178 cm
6
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apply and suggests that other challenges to modernism,
and art practice since Williams’ death, enable us now to
see Williams as a visionary artist ahead of his time.
regardless of background. Williams understood that the
destruction that took place in the Americas of the past and
what happens now in South American forests has global
relevance. Today, when our newspapers inform us about
the interconnected environmental state of our world, we
may more easily appreciate Williams’ timeless vision.
In 2010, over ten years since the Aubrey Williams exhibition
at the Whitechapel Gallery, two solo exhibitions are being
held concurrently in the North and the South of England.
The October Gallery, mounting Aubrey Williams: Now and
Coming Time in London, has consistently drawn attention
to the importance of Williams’ work, while the exhibition
Aubrey Williams: Atlantic Fire at the Walker Art Gallery in
Liverpool is the first time that a solo exhibition of his work has
been held in one of the UK’s national museums.
There have been some longstanding individual champions
of Williams’ work, notably Anne Walmsley, Guy Brett and
Rasheed Araeen, whose 1987 interview remains an insightful
resource. Nevertheless, full recognition is overdue. His
independent and intelligent approach to modern painting,
the authenticity of his concerns, and the emotional strength
and impact of his work mean that Williams is an artist who
can no longer be overlooked.
These exhibitions acknowledge and celebrate the way
that Williams used the cultural inheritance of Carib, Warrau
and Arawak peoples and Maya, Olmec, Aztec, Toltec and
Inca civilisations to create masterpieces of modern art.
Taking inspiration from close acquaintance with the Warrau
people and their living artistic culture, Williams developed
a passion for the historic indigenous cultures in Central and
South America in and beyond Guyana. 5 The references
to these in his work are not illustrations. Titles such as
Bonampak are not to be interpreted literally. Rather, these
historic cultures emerge as expressions of a deeply felt and
researched inheritance of an artist of subtlety and power.
Williams claimed them because they enabled him to find
a distinctly Caribbean artistic language: ‘I firmly feel that
such art should be automatically appreciated by people
from the Caribbean and from Guyana because they share
the same environment.’ 6 At the same time, he considered
that the Olmec and Mayan civilisations, in particular, could
and should be meaningful and an inspiration for everyone,
1 See also R. ARAEEN. (2006) ‘When the Naughty Children of Empire
Come Home to Roost’. Third Text. Vol 20 (Issue 2) pp. 233-239.
2 Authors who have made powerful arguments along these
lines include Kobena Mercer (K. MERCER. (2006) ‘Black Atlantic
Abstraction: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling’. In: K. MERCER.
(2006) Discrepant Abstraction. InIVA / MIT. London / Mass. pp. 207-
219) and Mel Gooding in ‘Aubrey Williams: The Making of a British
Artist’ in this catalogue. pp. 38-44.
3 A. DEMPSEY. (1998) ‘Curator’s Foreword’. In: WHITECHAPEL GALLERY
in association with InIVA Institute of International Visual Arts. Aubrey
Williams. [exhibition catalogue 12 June – 16 August] InIVA
Institute of International Visual Arts. London. p. 12.
4 R. ARAEEN. Excerpts from ‘Conversation with Aubrey
Williams’. Reprinted in this catalogue. pp. 17-18. Originally published
in Third Text. (2) pp. 25-52.
5 Williams frequently used the term pre-Columbian to describe the
group of cultures that inspired him and it is still one of the clearest
ways of referring to cultures prior to European contact. However,
some people today object to Central and South American history
being defined by the arrival of Columbus. Specialists now tend to use
Mesoamerican but this is not a well known term and defines a clear
geographic area that does not match Williams’ breadth of
knowledge. The term Amerindian is also widely used but not
considered appropriate by others who prefer indigenous or Native.
There is ongoing debate around correct terminology in this area and
throughout this publication authors have used the terminology they
carefully consider most appropriate. Where possible, specific terms to
describe the culture referred to are used in this publication. However,
Williams’ interest covered several peoples and civilisations and it is
neither possible, nor helpful to the meaning of his art, to attempt to
define which specifically is referenced.
6 A. WILLIAMS. (1967) ‘The Predicament of the Artist in the Caribbean’.
Talk given at CAM Conference, Canterbury, 16 September 1967.
Reprinted in A. WALMSLEY. (1990) Guyana Dreaming: The Art of
Aubrey Williams. Dangaroo Press. Aarhus, Denmark. p. 19.
left: (3) Hymn to the Sun IV, 1984
(Olmec Maya series)
Oil on canvas, 119 x 178 cm
right: (4) Symphony, 1985
Oil on canvas, 125 x 183 cm
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